25 Mantuano street, Madrid

2003-2007

In response to a citizens’ movement against the construction of a 500-car parking lot underneath Berlin Park and the imposition of fees at sports facilities, the Antimuseum organized Performances in the Park.

This was a deconstructed intervention in Berlin Park, where a number of artists carried out their creative activities under the sole condition of producing public space in confrontation with a system of norms that gradually limited the range of possible social practices and reduced them to practices of consumption in privatized spaces.

There was no curatorial theory behind Performances in the Park, nor any strictly artistic discourse. The Antimuseum eliminated these and instead, offered six reflections:

1. Space is a product. In other words, it is produced by human activity, and does not exist as a prior condition to it.
2. Nevertheless, it is impossible to enumerate, define or interpret all of a space possibilities, nor all possible spaces.
3. Urban space is one of these, and is produced based on a dialectical relationship between a material dimension (the physical construction of buildings; a legal-institutional structure; the set of norms that regulate their activity and the administrations which create and apply them) and a symbolic apparatus which allows us to understand our status as individuals within the relational flow which is culture.
4. In the city, we designate as public any space which can be used freely or which is institutional property (municipal, regional, national). Are the bar, the museum, the market, the stadium and the church not also public spaces?
5. We propose a new definition of public space as that which is produced by autonomous social practices, and define such practices as those which occur outside of the capital-producing system.
6. Hence, the public space is a place of conflict between capital and its institutions, which attempt to assimilate it into the productive cycle, and civil society, which attempts to preserve it in order to safeguard areas of autonomy.

It was up to each person whether to see the performances, expand upon them, ignore them, record them, multiply them, denounce them or join them: it was a matter for the public to decide.